Notice that due to a quirk in scouting, I still have not discovered the location of ANY of the other civs despite revealing a significant amount of the world map. I was starting to wonder where they were by this point. I continued trading with the other civs for new techs, settling more cities, and dealing with the barbarians before they became a problem. All routine stuff. In 860BC I finally paid through the nose for a complete world map and discovered where everyone was; this wasn't a waste of money since it also revealed some good city sites in areas I hadn't explored yet.

My early game is pretty funny in retrospect. I was in last place on the histograph all throughout the anicent age, since I had opted to build a granary rather than pump out an early settler. As time passed though, I slowly caught up and began to pass the other civs; it wasn't until 590BC that I climbed out of last place and moved into 3rd on the power graph. I'll put up the map from 510BC to give an indication of how things were developing at this point:

As you can see, I was equal with the three other civs by this point, as the effect of the early granary was beginning to be felt. I left a large patch of jungle near Berlin unsettled, as it was just too much work to clear the festering stuff out. My game entered the Middle Ages in 370BC when I bought Currency at through the nose prices, then turned around and sold my free scientific civ tech of Monotheism to everyone for a big profit. I made sure Russia was the last to enter the next age by selling Currency to them last. That's a little trick I love to do with scientific civs.

I hate anarchy, so I planned to change my government only once the entire game, from Despotism to Republic. In 290BC the tech was finally available to be purchased, so I did so and revolted immediately... only to get stuck with a 7 turn anarchy! Grrrr.... The only thing worse than the 7-turn anarchy is the 8-turn variety. I didn't come out of this state until 150BC; what a waste of time. Did I mention I hate anarchy? At least I moved into 1st place on the histograph in 190BC...

With the game set to have raging barbarians, I expect that many players had trouble with the massive uprisings. I was able to keep them almost completely under control however. This one in 330BC was the only one that I ever had to deal with:

I moved my spearman out of the town to save his life and accepted the hit. I lost about 20g, 5 turns of production in a worthless 1/1 city, and no population since the town was size 1. In fact, Stuttgard actually GREW on the next turn to size 2! Needless to say, barbs didn't present much of a problem to me, since I kept warriors out in the wilderness to deal with them and bought maps showing their location from the AI civs.

More towns were founded, but not much happened over all in the early AD years. I was preparing for my first attack (since conquest is mandatory for a high score) by building lots of horses, which I planned to upgrade en masse to knights and attack. This is a difficult strategy to pull off yet can yield massive results if done successfully, like SirPleb did to win GOTM5. Since I had never tried this, it was as good a time to try it as any. Here was the map in 10AD as I began gearing up for war:

By this time, I have out-expanded the other civs and developed a nice core of cities that I would use to control the game in my favor. I had not started work on the Forbidden Palace because I planned to build it with a leader in conquered territory. In 520AD, I discovered Chivalry from my own research (the AI ignored it as usual) and used the "scroll ahead" feature to upgrade 23 horsemen to knights and still use them to attack on that turn. Now it just remained to have a legitimate pretext for my warfare:

Cathy "unwisely" chose to declare war on ME! Well that was pretty dumb. You can see how the majority of my newly upgraded knights are located in Konigsburg, right on the Russian border. With the game's setup phase over, it was time for the main show to begin...